The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the art prior relevant to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
The evolvement of different services for mobile users has increased the exchange of small pieces of data among end user terminals and/or between end user terminals and a network. Examples of such small pieces of data include presence information updates and location information sent from a user terminal to a network server automatically without user interaction. For this kind of data exchange, i.e. a user terminal sending itself packet data, an activated packet data connection is required. The packet data connection in turn requires an activated packet data protocol context, or corresponding information defining a connection between the end user terminal and the network. Packet data protocol context activation contains assigning an IP address to the end user terminal to be used for packet data transmission to and from the end user terminal, and activating other subscriber-related parameters. Thus, the packet data protocol activation takes time and delays sending of the data. For example, presence information is occasional, usually time critical and should be forwarded without delay. One solution enabling delivery of a small piece of data as soon as it is available is to keep the packet data protocol context alive by sending “dummy messages”. A drawback of this solution is that it waists network resources and consumes power in the end user terminal.